Week 5: Mastering Multiple Choice Creation

          This week’s resources were focused on creating great multiple-choice questions. This week was a fun resource, as a college student, I am far too familiar with multiple questions. My father, who deems himself a great test taker, also coaches me on what hints or tricks I can use to master multiple choice problems. When I first saw the article, 10 Rules for Writing Multiple Choice Questions, I felt like they stole all my dad’s tricks. Tricks like eliminating two wrong answers, is overruled when you use Rule #4: Make all distractors plausible. This rule is very important because the purpose of quizzes and test is that the student reads the passage or knows the information, picking and choosing between two right answers, instead of four is more gambling then validating the student is understanding the task at hand. The other trick my dad introduce to me is that if it is hard to distinguish between two answers, go with the answer that elaborates more, or that is long in general. Rule #8 avoid this situation, I also like how the author mentions that if you cannot keep the same length make two answers short, and the other two answers longer but keep both pairs the same length.

            From the same resource, I also like to see rules that I have not thought of. I like Rule # 6 and #7. Rule #6 Avoid the use of double negative, although sometimes we like to phrase a question how it makes the most sense. With this rule, you can make sure the student will also understand the question. The example given takes a sentence that is slightly confusing and makes the question very clear, this is something I know that I struggle with, things I think are clear, could have been rephrased to be clearer. Rule #7 is Mix up the order of the correct answers, I think as test makers we will get into habits when making the test. We will probably put the right answers in the same place on multiple questions. It is a great idea to create the quiz and back through and reorder where the correct answers are placed.

            I believe this is a very useful week of resources, I will continue to use these rules as reminders as I create quizzes through my teaching career. Resources of how to write stems, and rewording questions will be a great resource to refer back to. The goal in teaching is to ensure students are fully understanding what you teach, and these resources will ensure that I am aware of who needs more instruction and who is grasping the whole concepts.